When Melbourne’s two ‘dry zones’ had compulsory ballots for restaurant and café liquor licences removed in 2015, news accounts surmised that “a hangover from the anti-alcohol movement of the 1920s had finally been relegated to the history books”. Yet the dry zones are chapters in a longer, ongoing story. The 1920 poll that created these...

Quarrying is a noxious industrial activity necessary for the provision of stone and clay, utilised predominately in building activities as the city grows. In post-industrial Melbourne, the extraction of these materials has left a pock-marked landscape, reflecting the fact that the city was settled upon an opportune juncture of sand-and-clay, basalt, and mudstone fields.

There has been increasing awareness of the importance of the creative and knowledge economies for Australian cities, and the physical places and spaces that support them. Often located in transit-orientated post-industrial areas, knowledge precincts, and creative precincts, require coordinated policy support to promote this particular land use type and avoid being turned into high-density residential...

Melbourne group Boom Crash Opera’s 1987 single ‘City Flat’ is a musically exuberant (though according to at least one critic, lyrically ‘fairly bleak’) single celebrating a sparse inner-Melbourne lifestyle in which limited means enhance and highlight minor pleasures: coffee, kitchens, hanging out. Now just thirty years old, the song celebrates a cheap, recycled, ad hoc...

The suburban municipality of Brimbank is strategically located across key transport corridors serving Melbourne’s rapid western and northwestern expansion. Brimbank Rising steps through local prehistory and history with attention to planning events from Hoddle’s 1840 survey to the recent Regional Rail Link which shape the area. Across five periods, this history sees planning as a...